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The thing that really makes things worse is that the police are causing most of these protests and riots with their violent, unwarranted behavior. This trigger

The thing that really makes things worse is that the police are causing most of these protests and riots with their violent, unwarranted behavior. This triggers riots and protests, which require the police to work overtime. They get paid for causing all these problems, and well paid. Their overtime costs must be tremendous. And who ends up paying? We do. We should claw back police overtime pay for any protests or riots that are caused by the police themselves. I think that's fair and equitable.

rabidrat 6y ago
Over the last week I have been starting to realize that what you said is true in general, and not just of protests. It seems that police inflame and instigate most of the violent situations they are involved in. We are literally paying to be abused. We shouldn't be trying to get that money back; we shouldn't even be paying it in the first place.
- fiblye 6y ago
  One example is civil asset forfeiture. Police can and do stop people at random, see if they have “suspicious” valuables or a little too much money, and seize it. It’s virtually impossible to fight the case and it’s literally free money with zero consequence to the police. If you try to deny them their free money, they just arrest you. It’s legally condoned robbery. I’ve had friends who’ve been pulled over while passing through Illinois and asked to hand over their wallets just so the cops can count their money. They only had a few bucks and were let go, but I’m sure if it was a little too much, the cops would’ve claimed it was drug money and taken it. The cops didn’t mention speeding or any sort of crime, so their reason for pulling them over was pretty clear. They probably target non-local people because nobody is going to come back just for a hundred bucks or so, and if they need to make up a ticket on the spot, few people will bother to fight it.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    What’s also bizarre is that it’s probably funding their local department and not some general state account, further skewing incentives. It’s like the Police has a letter of Marque to do piracy. [0] Except that means they are at war with you, not a foreign country. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque
  - wrmsr 6y ago
    It actually exceeds non-police theft these days: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-... ( https://outline.com/UX7nfW https://outline.com/UX7nfW ).
  - dillonmckay 6y ago
    Even worse is seizing vehicles that are still not paid off. The police department will determine if it is worth ‘paying off’ the remaining loan amount, so they can seize the car and sell it at auction.
  - skissane 6y ago
    > It’s virtually impossible to fight the case and it’s literally free money with zero consequence to the police. This is a problem that could be easily greatly improved with legislation (and without requiring the more radical and controversial step of abolishing civil forfeiture entirely) - each state could legislate that civil forfeiture proceeds are to be paid into the general state budget not kept by the local police forces. This would remove much of the incentive for overuse of civil forfeiture.
- logicchains 6y ago
  A 2500-year-old quote still relevant today: "When a nation hoards weapons, troubles arise from within and from without. When its leaders try to be cunning and clever, the situation spins further out of control. When they try to fix things by passing more laws, they only increase the number of outlaws." 民多利器、國家滋昏。人多伎巧、奇物滋起。法令滋彰、盜賊多有。
  - blackrock 6y ago
    LOL. Confucius strikes again.
  - deathgrips 6y ago
    Very clever, but given the benefit of history I disagree with the first line. Weakness invites trouble, but strength is not the solution to every problem.
  - lucio 6y ago
    Si vis pacem, para bellum
- vegai_ 6y ago
  What would you suggest instead of police, when the goal is to maintain a civilization of diverse people?
- partyboat1586 6y ago
  I have this idealised vision of a police force that are more like monks. Their main training is mental, meditation, mindfulness, situational awareness, sensitivity training, de-escalation training. They are also extremely well trained in combat and self defence but almost never use it. When they do they can quickly disarm and subdue violent perps without struggle. They exist just to keep the peace between people. People could grow to trust and respect them in a way that they can't for cops. It would have to be a lifelong pursuit like a real monk, without much financial incentive. The problem is without trust and respect it wouldn't work since no one would enlist. I'm not sure how you would bootstrap something like that.
  - greedo 6y ago
    Jedi don't scale...
krzyk 6y ago
Don't throw all police officers into one bucket. You have some outliers that are violent and the rest just does their job - keeping the city more safe. Also don't assume all cases of police officer shooting a person are cases of police brutality - this is for court to prove.
- watwut 6y ago
  If this would be the case, the rest would report the violent ones, would testify against them and violent ones would be removed. This would happen in cases where is no video and no public outcry. That it does not seem to be happening unless there is video and public outcry suggest the issue is cultural and institutional, not just individual. The good cop is not reporting bad cop and is not testifying against him. Maybe the good cop would be retaliated against, maybe nothing would be done, and all of those are reasons why bad cops are empowered.
  - krzyk 6y ago
    Would you report your fellow in company that e.g. goes late to work? Or uses corporate assets (printer, laptop) for personal things? This is similar, if you know someone you have less incentive to report on one. The better you know them, the higher is the bar for reporting.
    - deathcakes 6y ago
      I would report someone in my company who attacked someone else with no provocation. Or murdered someone. I don't think this comparison is as good as you think it is.
      - sethammons 6y ago
        Would you tell on your loved one, good friend, and/or favorite cousin if they attacked someone? What if you could rationalize what they did? What if you told on them and that meant turning your back on the rest of your family and them all shunning you, or hurting and harassing you? I think we need some massive overhauling of how accountability works in police situations and I think that will have to start with shit rolling uphill.
raxxorrax 6y ago
That is neither fair, feasible nor practical to be honest. You want to judge them as a group while basically complaining against their practices of profiling.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  A department is a group, one that they voluntarily joined.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    The comment accused the police as a whole for inciting protest. In this case a police officer probably failed his duties and the police gets accused as a whole. You should accuse government, it would be more believable.
    - take_a_breath 6y ago
      Do the police not like being profiled? Maybe they can take their own advice.
globular-toast 6y ago
> The thing that really makes things worse is that the police are causing most of these protests and riots with their violent, unwarranted behavior. We've had children "protesting" here in the UK too despite the police not generally participating in brutality.
Shivetya 6y ago
Expect the push for more funding of the police to be the eventual narrative. This is to allow for more training and putting more officers where they are needed. Simply put, the defund the police slogans are damaging to the DNC outlooks in November and three major unions basically read the riot act to the DNC and members in Congress that no talk that can come back to collective bargaining being a reason police get away with so much abuse is allowed. Instead it must be that they lack training, the security of their pension system raises anxiety among the forces, and lack of officers incurs overtime furthering anxiety. So the only solution is more money for training, propping up their pension systems, and more money for community policing. just put it this way, when that was dropped on me from a relative as their new marching orders I thought they were joking. tl;dr the whole defund the police calling is poison in November and the big influences in politics has called their party to the carpet to change the direction of the debate
- megous 6y ago
  "We do bad job, give us more money." doesn't sound like a good incentive, though.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    Have you ever improved a team by taking away resources?
    - rabidrat 6y ago
      Have you ever improved an overfunded team by giving them more resources?
sneak 6y ago
Additionally, the civil rights suits later brought against them get paid by taxpayers, not the offending officers. Their abuse is literally publicly subsidized. Lawsuit settlements for the police committing human rights abuses should come out of the police pension fund.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Lawsuit settlements for the police committing human rights abuses should come out of the police pension fund. No, they should come out of taxpayer funds. The principal is responsible for the actions of their agents. If the public authority doesn't properly screen, train, supervise, and discipline police to protect civil rights, it is their responsibility and the responsibility of the public who chooses that authority. Absolving the public authority and the public of responsibility just means that there is reduced incentives to address systemic problems.
  - sneak 6y ago
    > supervise, and discipline police to protect civil rights I'm pretty sure that that's what I just proposed, by causing the results of supervision and discipline to trigger negative consequences.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      Not really. It doesn't create negative consequences for the individual wrongdoers, or even the police collectively except perhaps extremely indirectly. It is symbolic collective punishment, but substantively it's just a way for the public authority to defer its own consequences so they are distant from the problem, since a pension fund is literally just the fund out of which the public authority pays it's pension obligations to retiring police before having to resort to using other funds. Depleting the fund for unrelated purposes doesn't reduce the public authority’s contractual obligations to each retiring officer. You may be mistakenly assuming that exhausting the pension fund directly cuts pensions for those covered, which would still be remote just in targeted individuals and time, but there is no necessary relationship there. It just makes it more likely that the public authority would be forced to declare bankruptcy because it can't meet it's pension obligations, at which point it might be able to shed pension obligations for employees (not just those covered by the fund, if the police have a distinct fund!) as part of the bankruptcy, but that could happen as a result of direct settlement payments, as well. In the fairly common case where the police don't even have even have their own pension fund but contribute to a common fund with other employees, perhaps not even from the same local jurisdiction (e.g., California local governments where often both police and other employees are covered by CalPERS), taking it out of the fund would even lack the symbolic sense that it has in the more simple case. If you want direct liability for the people doing the immediate wrong, you want an end to, or limitations on, qualified immunity, not redirecting public authoriry liability to pension funds. That, of course, would make the public authority not responsible, but to would mean that individual cops would also be responsible on civil suits.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Where I live, the police costs half my cities budget. And that’s not even including contributions to the pension, to my knowledge. It does not appear that this is money well spent.
pc86 6y ago
I think "just don't pay them for the time" is not reasonable or realistic, and thinking you can get consensus on what caused a riot is naive under the best of circumstances. On the flip side I'd like to point out that this increased OT often has downstream effects as well, most notably in pensions which are typically based on your last n months of pay. Some contracts include OT in this and some do not. So soon-to-be-retired officers could literally be increasing their pay for the rest of their lives based on increased pay due to working a riot.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  I think that their continued behavior is putting the pensions at risk, since those depend on continuous taxpayer contributions. It’s not wise to tear gas the people who are going to pay for your retirement.
  - pc86 6y ago
    Based on this comment it's not clear how much experience you have with public sector unions generally or LEO contract negotiations specifically, or how public sector pensions typically work. Barring conviction of a crime (and sometimes even in spite of conviction, depending on the offense), your pension is generally set based on your hire date, and is a percentage of your salary based on the average over some period of time (last 3 years is pretty common). About half the time these pensions are exempt from municipal bankruptcies. It would take legislation to dismantle these pension systems that would almost certainly be litigated and spend years in court, during which time they would still have to be paid out. They're not putting their financial future at risk.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      The individual officer is guaranteed access to the pension, but there is no guarantee that the public ever bothered to fully fund said pension.
downerending 6y ago
> the police are causing most of these protests and riots Free will is a thing, and the police cannot make you go out and commit vandalism, mayhem, and murder.
- rabidrat 6y ago
  Free will is questionably a thing. If you are trapped, hungry, thirsty, threatened, and you see your neighbors beaten for minor infractions, then some kind of "mayhem" is not an unreasonable choice. Or would you rather they quietly took the abuse and had their next-of-kin file a complaint that will be summarily ignored? BTW these are all things that protesters experience, as the police as trained in "crowd control" techniques which involve kettling and provoking masses of people so they can exert force to teach them a lesson.
  - downerending 6y ago
    Mayhem is always an unreasonable choice. And it certainly won't feed you if you're hungry. And judging by the pictures, very few of the protesters were desperate, tired, hungry, downtrodden, etc. For most, it's an opportunity to virtue signal for a day or two, and then go back to their relatively affluent lives and forget about all of this. Hardly a one would be caught dead tutoring some inner city kid with their algebra. Far more fun to taunt cops in an impossible position.

rabidrat 6y ago

Over the last week I have been starting to realize that what you said is true in general, and not just of protests. It seems that police inflame and instigate most of the violent situations they are involved in. We are literally paying to be abused. We shouldn't be trying to get that money back; we shouldn't even be paying it in the first place.

fiblye 6y ago
One example is civil asset forfeiture. Police can and do stop people at random, see if they have “suspicious” valuables or a little too much money, and seize it. It’s virtually impossible to fight the case and it’s literally free money with zero consequence to the police. If you try to deny them their free money, they just arrest you. It’s legally condoned robbery. I’ve had friends who’ve been pulled over while passing through Illinois and asked to hand over their wallets just so the cops can count their money. They only had a few bucks and were let go, but I’m sure if it was a little too much, the cops would’ve claimed it was drug money and taken it. The cops didn’t mention speeding or any sort of crime, so their reason for pulling them over was pretty clear. They probably target non-local people because nobody is going to come back just for a hundred bucks or so, and if they need to make up a ticket on the spot, few people will bother to fight it.
- jacobush 6y ago
  What’s also bizarre is that it’s probably funding their local department and not some general state account, further skewing incentives. It’s like the Police has a letter of Marque to do piracy. [0] Except that means they are at war with you, not a foreign country. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque
- wrmsr 6y ago
  It actually exceeds non-police theft these days: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-... ( https://outline.com/UX7nfW https://outline.com/UX7nfW ).
- dillonmckay 6y ago
  Even worse is seizing vehicles that are still not paid off. The police department will determine if it is worth ‘paying off’ the remaining loan amount, so they can seize the car and sell it at auction.
- skissane 6y ago
  > It’s virtually impossible to fight the case and it’s literally free money with zero consequence to the police. This is a problem that could be easily greatly improved with legislation (and without requiring the more radical and controversial step of abolishing civil forfeiture entirely) - each state could legislate that civil forfeiture proceeds are to be paid into the general state budget not kept by the local police forces. This would remove much of the incentive for overuse of civil forfeiture.
logicchains 6y ago
A 2500-year-old quote still relevant today: "When a nation hoards weapons, troubles arise from within and from without. When its leaders try to be cunning and clever, the situation spins further out of control. When they try to fix things by passing more laws, they only increase the number of outlaws." 民多利器、國家滋昏。人多伎巧、奇物滋起。法令滋彰、盜賊多有。
- blackrock 6y ago
  LOL. Confucius strikes again.
- deathgrips 6y ago
  Very clever, but given the benefit of history I disagree with the first line. Weakness invites trouble, but strength is not the solution to every problem.
- lucio 6y ago
  Si vis pacem, para bellum
vegai_ 6y ago
What would you suggest instead of police, when the goal is to maintain a civilization of diverse people?
partyboat1586 6y ago
I have this idealised vision of a police force that are more like monks. Their main training is mental, meditation, mindfulness, situational awareness, sensitivity training, de-escalation training. They are also extremely well trained in combat and self defence but almost never use it. When they do they can quickly disarm and subdue violent perps without struggle. They exist just to keep the peace between people. People could grow to trust and respect them in a way that they can't for cops. It would have to be a lifelong pursuit like a real monk, without much financial incentive. The problem is without trust and respect it wouldn't work since no one would enlist. I'm not sure how you would bootstrap something like that.
- greedo 6y ago
  Jedi don't scale...

krzyk 6y ago

Don't throw all police officers into one bucket. You have some outliers that are violent and the rest just does their job - keeping the city more safe. Also don't assume all cases of police officer shooting a person are cases of police brutality - this is for court to prove.

watwut 6y ago
If this would be the case, the rest would report the violent ones, would testify against them and violent ones would be removed. This would happen in cases where is no video and no public outcry. That it does not seem to be happening unless there is video and public outcry suggest the issue is cultural and institutional, not just individual. The good cop is not reporting bad cop and is not testifying against him. Maybe the good cop would be retaliated against, maybe nothing would be done, and all of those are reasons why bad cops are empowered.
- krzyk 6y ago
  Would you report your fellow in company that e.g. goes late to work? Or uses corporate assets (printer, laptop) for personal things? This is similar, if you know someone you have less incentive to report on one. The better you know them, the higher is the bar for reporting.
  - deathcakes 6y ago
    I would report someone in my company who attacked someone else with no provocation. Or murdered someone. I don't think this comparison is as good as you think it is.
    - sethammons 6y ago
      Would you tell on your loved one, good friend, and/or favorite cousin if they attacked someone? What if you could rationalize what they did? What if you told on them and that meant turning your back on the rest of your family and them all shunning you, or hurting and harassing you? I think we need some massive overhauling of how accountability works in police situations and I think that will have to start with shit rolling uphill.

raxxorrax 6y ago

That is neither fair, feasible nor practical to be honest. You want to judge them as a group while basically complaining against their practices of profiling.

boomboomsubban 6y ago
A department is a group, one that they voluntarily joined.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  The comment accused the police as a whole for inciting protest. In this case a police officer probably failed his duties and the police gets accused as a whole. You should accuse government, it would be more believable.
  - take_a_breath 6y ago
    Do the police not like being profiled? Maybe they can take their own advice.

globular-toast 6y ago

> The thing that really makes things worse is that the police are causing most of these protests and riots with their violent, unwarranted behavior. We've had children "protesting" here in the UK too despite the police not generally participating in brutality.

Shivetya 6y ago

Expect the push for more funding of the police to be the eventual narrative. This is to allow for more training and putting more officers where they are needed. Simply put, the defund the police slogans are damaging to the DNC outlooks in November and three major unions basically read the riot act to the DNC and members in Congress that no talk that can come back to collective bargaining being a reason police get away with so much abuse is allowed. Instead it must be that they lack training, the security of their pension system raises anxiety among the forces, and lack of officers incurs overtime furthering anxiety. So the only solution is more money for training, propping up their pension systems, and more money for community policing. just put it this way, when that was dropped on me from a relative as their new marching orders I thought they were joking. tl;dr the whole defund the police calling is poison in November and the big influences in politics has called their party to the carpet to change the direction of the debate

megous 6y ago
"We do bad job, give us more money." doesn't sound like a good incentive, though.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  Have you ever improved a team by taking away resources?
  - rabidrat 6y ago
    Have you ever improved an overfunded team by giving them more resources?

sneak 6y ago

Additionally, the civil rights suits later brought against them get paid by taxpayers, not the offending officers. Their abuse is literally publicly subsidized. Lawsuit settlements for the police committing human rights abuses should come out of the police pension fund.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> Lawsuit settlements for the police committing human rights abuses should come out of the police pension fund. No, they should come out of taxpayer funds. The principal is responsible for the actions of their agents. If the public authority doesn't properly screen, train, supervise, and discipline police to protect civil rights, it is their responsibility and the responsibility of the public who chooses that authority. Absolving the public authority and the public of responsibility just means that there is reduced incentives to address systemic problems.
- sneak 6y ago
  > supervise, and discipline police to protect civil rights I'm pretty sure that that's what I just proposed, by causing the results of supervision and discipline to trigger negative consequences.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    Not really. It doesn't create negative consequences for the individual wrongdoers, or even the police collectively except perhaps extremely indirectly. It is symbolic collective punishment, but substantively it's just a way for the public authority to defer its own consequences so they are distant from the problem, since a pension fund is literally just the fund out of which the public authority pays it's pension obligations to retiring police before having to resort to using other funds. Depleting the fund for unrelated purposes doesn't reduce the public authority’s contractual obligations to each retiring officer. You may be mistakenly assuming that exhausting the pension fund directly cuts pensions for those covered, which would still be remote just in targeted individuals and time, but there is no necessary relationship there. It just makes it more likely that the public authority would be forced to declare bankruptcy because it can't meet it's pension obligations, at which point it might be able to shed pension obligations for employees (not just those covered by the fund, if the police have a distinct fund!) as part of the bankruptcy, but that could happen as a result of direct settlement payments, as well. In the fairly common case where the police don't even have even have their own pension fund but contribute to a common fund with other employees, perhaps not even from the same local jurisdiction (e.g., California local governments where often both police and other employees are covered by CalPERS), taking it out of the fund would even lack the symbolic sense that it has in the more simple case. If you want direct liability for the people doing the immediate wrong, you want an end to, or limitations on, qualified immunity, not redirecting public authoriry liability to pension funds. That, of course, would make the public authority not responsible, but to would mean that individual cops would also be responsible on civil suits.

ashtonkem 6y ago

Where I live, the police costs half my cities budget. And that’s not even including contributions to the pension, to my knowledge. It does not appear that this is money well spent.

pc86 6y ago

I think "just don't pay them for the time" is not reasonable or realistic, and thinking you can get consensus on what caused a riot is naive under the best of circumstances. On the flip side I'd like to point out that this increased OT often has downstream effects as well, most notably in pensions which are typically based on your last n months of pay. Some contracts include OT in this and some do not. So soon-to-be-retired officers could literally be increasing their pay for the rest of their lives based on increased pay due to working a riot.

ashtonkem 6y ago
I think that their continued behavior is putting the pensions at risk, since those depend on continuous taxpayer contributions. It’s not wise to tear gas the people who are going to pay for your retirement.
- pc86 6y ago
  Based on this comment it's not clear how much experience you have with public sector unions generally or LEO contract negotiations specifically, or how public sector pensions typically work. Barring conviction of a crime (and sometimes even in spite of conviction, depending on the offense), your pension is generally set based on your hire date, and is a percentage of your salary based on the average over some period of time (last 3 years is pretty common). About half the time these pensions are exempt from municipal bankruptcies. It would take legislation to dismantle these pension systems that would almost certainly be litigated and spend years in court, during which time they would still have to be paid out. They're not putting their financial future at risk.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    The individual officer is guaranteed access to the pension, but there is no guarantee that the public ever bothered to fully fund said pension.

downerending 6y ago

> the police are causing most of these protests and riots Free will is a thing, and the police cannot make you go out and commit vandalism, mayhem, and murder.

rabidrat 6y ago
Free will is questionably a thing. If you are trapped, hungry, thirsty, threatened, and you see your neighbors beaten for minor infractions, then some kind of "mayhem" is not an unreasonable choice. Or would you rather they quietly took the abuse and had their next-of-kin file a complaint that will be summarily ignored? BTW these are all things that protesters experience, as the police as trained in "crowd control" techniques which involve kettling and provoking masses of people so they can exert force to teach them a lesson.
- downerending 6y ago
  Mayhem is always an unreasonable choice. And it certainly won't feed you if you're hungry. And judging by the pictures, very few of the protesters were desperate, tired, hungry, downtrodden, etc. For most, it's an opportunity to virtue signal for a day or two, and then go back to their relatively affluent lives and forget about all of this. Hardly a one would be caught dead tutoring some inner city kid with their algebra. Far more fun to taunt cops in an impossible position.